The December update for Fallout 76 will be a big update. In addition to the introduction of Camp Pets and the ability to earn descriptive player titles for your Vault resident, Bethesda’s online Fallout game is also getting a challenging new end-game raid called The Gleaming Depths, in which co-op teams of up to four players take on a series of challenges whose lead producer Bill LaCoste tells me this is “something completely new for 76”.
Set in the Ash Heap region of Appalachia, the Gleaming Depths was described as a “traditional MMO-style dungeon” in tonight’s Fallout Day broadcast, and LaCoste tells me it’s a “huge step forward” from relative to their existing endgame activities.
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“The one thing we always wanted to do was bring a little more challenge into the game, especially for a game that’s online and where people are working together in teams and actually doing something competitive,” he says. “We have a lot of events, we have bosses, we have things like that. But for something that is specifically for your team of people to do something that requires teamwork and a good amount of equipment and communication between teams is something completely new for 76.”
In The Gleaming Depths, players must fight their way through an abandoned Enclave research laboratory where scientists were studying a phenomenon known as Ultragenesis, all of which, according to Fallout lore, is tied up in the spread of ultracite through the Earth. There will be “several incredibly demanding encounters” inside, creative director Jonathan Rush said in today’s Fallout Day broadcast – including the game’s biggest boss ever, the Ultracite Terror – and players will also be locked in the bitter end of the raid. , once they start, making it a real do-or-die challenge.
The idea came from a weeklong internal game jam at Bethesda in January, LaCoste says. There was some suspicion from the team of developers working on it that it could potentially be “transformative for Fallout 76,” but it wasn’t until “after people took a picture of it and actually played it that they said, ‘Oh man , this is something that the game absolutely needs’, and I think everyone was really impressed with how well it was executed.”
The jam build was then moved into the pre-production phase to further test out the ideas – with a little help from Rush’s collection of glove puppets, to try and specify what each encounter might look like in practice. “We do that quite regularly with all of our meetings that we build,” LaCoste says. “We try to do those on paper and other props and things like that ahead of time, because even in those cases we can work out a lot of timing, and Jon does a great job of that.”
Playtests followed, which only confirmed what Bethesda already knew: yes, this is “exactly” what Fallout 76 needed, especially at a time when so many other substantial changes were coming along with it.
“Historically, we’ve had four major beats a year and a lot of content has been distributed within that,” LaCoste says. “But with this it just felt different, because we had just released legendary crafting with the previous update, and now we have something that ties in even better with raids.”
Conveniently, the December update will also see the introduction of legendary four-star rewards, giving players even more powerful endgame tools, weapons, armor and potential equipment to take on the tough bosses of the Gleaming Depths. Unfortunately, you’re not guaranteed a four-star reward for surviving the Gleaming Depths, so you’ll have to play it multiple times to get the most out of it.
But four-star items are just one of many elements that Bethesda’ hopes to build on [update]”, as with new legendaries, new gear, new mod combinations for weapons and armor, and there will also be new perks with them, says LaCoste. “We have so many of these systems all coming together in this update, that I think players are going to get a lot spending time on their jobs board, trying out new gear, and going through this game in a different way, which is good!”
That goes double for the playable Ghoul characters coming early next year, giving players past Level 50 the chance to turn themselves into Fallout’s radiation-loving corpses to receive extra special perks and abilities. First revealed in June, I wondered at the time if there would be any new events to really test Ghoul characters, and while LaCoste says The Gleaming Depths isn’t specifically designed with the Ghouls in mind, “I will saying that because we knew the Ghouls were coming, [… and] the positives and negatives that come with being a Ghoul, some of them have been taken into account.”
But ultimately, this is “its own raid,” and LaCoste is looking forward to seeing what impact Ghouls will have on the way players approach The Gleaming Depths when they arrive sometime next year.
